HPSIM SNMP or plain WBEM/WMI

[UselessUser]

Hi,

Running HPSIM and just pointed the discovery at a HP windows server which has no SNMP but has the HP WMI package installed...

It has discovered everything succesfully and it looks good... so why would I roll the SNMP agent onto the server?

Is there anything that is SNMP only, or WBEM only??

Also in the SMH I can configure thresholds, but in another tab there is a setting which is either WBEM or SNMP, it is the Select SMH Data Source option...

Does this specify how the server monitors itself or how it sends the message to HP SIM???

[Rob Buxton]

SNMP is still slightly richer in some of the items it reports back on. WBEM is catching up though.

But if this is a physical HP server then without SNMP you cannot install the HP Agents, and without those you will lose the failure and pre-failure notifications picked up by the agents.

[UselessUser]

Hi,

Yes this is a physical HP server... may I ask you to clarify what you mean by failure and pre-failure notifications by the agents...

Do you mean the agents have some kind of hook in to the hardware which WBEM does not?

[Rob Buxton]

It's the agents that actually monitor the hardware. When they detect an issue they generate SNMP Traps.
I must admit I'm not fully up on how wbem gets it's info. Starting to delve a bit more as with VMware ESXi there are no agents and wbem is used to monitor the hardware.

How far the wbem can duplicate what the agents / snmp I'm not sure at the moment. The last post I saw from HP still seemed to suggest that snmp was the way to go unless you couldn't use it.
I'm not sure how effective wbem can be without the agents.

[UselessUser]

Hi,

Well I pulled a disk out of a server earlier and WBEM correctly reported 6 odd events back to my HP SIM installation for that...

I am beginning to think the agents (Which I have installed without SNMP) are watching the hardware via device driver, and then when things happen, the agent does something which is flagged by a watching WMI consumer, which then fires the event to HP SIM... (Anyone confirm this?, how do SNMP and WBEM work together if both installed - or do they both send events and HP SIM sorts them out)

I have created my own WMI consumer as a test, it just watches for an instance of notepad to be launched, and then performs an action...

What I would eventually like to do is create my own add ons to HP's so I can monitor a service, and when it fails fire an event to HP SIM... (A bit like using SNMP with evntwin)

Problem is at the moment I have no idea how HP WBEM agents forward their messages to HP SIM?

I cannot find any documents on HP's website which explain the difference in monitored items of WBEM vs SNMP but there is a firewall document which seems to suggest using WBEM as it is more secure, and makes no mention of any losses of information for doing this?

[Rob Mills]

HP has told me on a couple of occasions that the current set of WBEM providers does do pre-failure alerts.

[Rob Buxton]

You need to subscribe to WBEM Events in HPSIM.
That should get those going.
Also, if you have the HP Agents installed then you should see an HP Management Agents GUI (available via Control Panel) using that you can get the agents to monitor services.

[UselessUser]

Hi I take it you are first responding to Rob Mills comment with the need to subscribe comment?

Also I have the HPAgents version 8.11.0 on this server in question and whilst I have the icon in control panel it seems it can only manage selective processes but not services??

[shocko]

Hmm, how does wbem work in the acse of a netowrk card failure? i.e.e if using only webem/wmi the ilo will not report back to the CMS when a network card failure occurss because no snmp trap will be generated?

[shocko]

Hey guys, just thought i'd bump this thread up to see who's using WBEM providors and what they think of them. Personally, i haven't used them much as i found they crashed a lot on my system. However, for interoperability with other systems, they would make life so easy as your could easily add information by querying the HP namespace. It would be easy to add ,say, firmware information to SCOM/SCCM etc.

Any opinions/thoughts welcome